Tara, who was a close family friend of Prince Charles and a trained classical pianist, revealed she was fighting the illness after going for a set of blood tests after feeling run down the previous summer.

Now her friend Lady Victoria has remembered her "laugh" and incredible social life, as she paid tribute to the star.

She revealed they were "thrown together" as society girls in the 1990s and quickly became rivals.

But the star has insisted they grew to become good friends.

"In the end, I grew to love her and her death has left me reeling. I feel like a part of me, too, has died," she told the Mail Online in a moving first person tribute.

Lady Victoria admitted she took herself away from the London social life for a while years later, "to save her sanity", but Tara stayed, and she admitted: "I wonder what would have happened if she hadn’t remained there."

In fact, Victoria revealed Tara had a "vulnerability" about her, and added: "She had an emotional fragility that would ultimately be her undoing."